Titan Quest is actually a great example of DRM working directly against sales.

To loosely quote the devs: "We had people complaining about crashes on the forums before the game was even officially released! Well, that wasn't even a real crash; it was our elite and super clever DRM that the scene didn't find!"

So, in the REAL world, word of mouth is the greatest sales tool. Never included in piracy stats are the viral marketing effects these copies generate; much like a demo.

So their game releases and the natural piracy things happen behind the scenes, as is to be expectedů But their super clever DRM directly and exclusively tainted the viral hype the pirates were generating with the message that the game was unplayable and crashed non-stop, which was actually the DRM doing its job as intended!

And now the same team who had so little faith in people that they saw fit to use stupidly clever DRM are asking for 3.5 million bucks, to make their heads explode, on a faith basis that the old DRM ordeal reveals isn't mutual!